Enchantment (15 page)

After he came out of that waking dream, the man's face stayed with him. He saw it behind his closed eyes, glimpsed it in a crowd, saw it from a bus, passing him in a bus going the other way. The high, bald forehead, the moustache, the sideboards, the stony eyes.

The man was a fact. The speeding lorry was a fact, so was the unrelated accident. The rest was fantasy, but there were elements in it that had become
just as real
. Tim had conjured up one of Craig's ‘demons in us all'. He was haunted for days by the lorry driver's face.

Why be haunted by a mythical lorry driver? H. V. Trotman was there in the flesh.

One evening when Tim got off the bus, Harold was leaning against the side of the bus shelter. He pushed his bulky body upright and fell into step beside Tim, padding like a bear.

‘Nice to see you,' Tim said hopefully.

‘Didn't think you would? After what you done?'

‘I've paid you back. What are you talking about?'

‘You know what I'm talking about.'

They had reached the house. Harold went with Tim up the path and passed the bay window, peering into the empty front-room, and followed him up the stairs and into the flat when Tim opened the door.

‘Thanks for inviting me in, old son.' Harold looked round suspiciously, as if he expected an ambush. ‘Going to offer me a beer?'

‘Do you want one?'

‘No.' Harold lit a cigarette, turned a chair back to front and sat down with his arms on the back of the chair.

Tim sat down opposite him. It was like his interview at Webster's two years ago, when Mr D. had commanded, ‘Give an account of yourself.'

‘You.' Harold pointed a blunt-ended finger. ‘You tried to pin it on me.'

‘What are you – what do you mean?'

‘The murders. Kev at C.P. Games told me. Tried to pin it on me.'

‘How could I?' Tim sat back, wishing he were smoking himself,
so that he could do Elyot nonchalantly tapping off the ash, from
Private Lives
. ‘That's ridiculous.' He could not explain why he had borrowed Black Monk for Barry McCarthy. By this time, he was not sure himself. ‘They got the man who killed all those people. He was dead.'

‘You … tried … to … pin … it … on … me,' Harold droned. Sometimes he sounded like Gareth and Sean.

‘I didn't. Suppose I had,' Tim said, avoiding his bloodshot eyes, ‘what do you want me to do about it?'

‘Nothing. It's what I'm going to do.'

‘What –' Tim thought about the royal family, with their necks on the block at the Tower of London. ‘What are you going to do?'

‘Ah, that's the question, old son.' Harold lifted a finger to the side of his nose. One of the long gingery hairs that grew out of the middle of it waved in the small updraught and curled over the finger. ‘You'll have to see, won't you?'

‘Please don't threaten me.' Tim smiled ingratiatingly, like a puppy on its back, waggling its paws.

‘I'm not threatening you, son.' Harold was a great conversationalist. ‘I'm just telling you.'

He left in quite an amicable way, so that Tim thought that was the end of that. Just Harold venting his aggressive feelings, to avoid cancer.

A few days later, Tim stopped Buttercup at a traffic light. A white car drew up beside him. Harold was driving it, looking straight ahead. When the lights changed, he got away fast and cut over in front of Tim, then slowed, so that Tim had to brake, and a woman behind nearly had a heart attack.

Harold continued to turn up now and again in odd places. Tim took to new routes and new habits to avoid him. Sometimes he saw Harold. Sometimes he only thought he did. Sometimes Harold's broad, suffused face and the lorry driver's long pale face were mixed up together in his imaginings.

Several times, the phone rang, and there was no one there.

‘Hello … hello …' Tim had to answer, because his father was
not well (‘Always belittled my cough, now perhaps you'll believe me'), and it might be his mother.

Harold disappeared for a time, but then he turned up in Fabrics and Soft Furnishings, wearing clean khaki trousers and a jazzy shirt.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?' Tim said politely, because Mr D. was near by.

‘I'm a customer.'

‘What is it you want?'

‘You know what I want.' Anyone could have written Harold's repetitious dialogue for him.

‘Look.' Tim dropped his voice. ‘I'll get one of the other assistants to help you.'

‘I want to see some of that lot there.' Harold jerked his head at the striped polished cottons, and he and Tim moved over to them.

‘Please,' Tim said, his eyes on Mr D. ‘Don't do this to me.'

‘Got to keep an eye on you, haven't I? After what you done.'

‘Harold,' Tim said desperately, ‘you've got to get this through your head. I haven't done anything to you.'

‘That's what they all say.'

‘You're paranoid,' Tim whispered.

‘Of course I am,' Harold said loudly. ‘Oo wouldn't be? I'll take three metres of that pink and chocolate stuff there.'

And he did. The sale was completed normally and he took the striped cotton away. Actually, it would look quite nice on the woman with the violet mouth.

They were doing
Pygmalion
at the Boathouse. Craig's part was Freddy Eynsford Hill. Tim was there every night. He watched the play from the usher's tip-up seat at the side, and began to have most of Freddy's lines off by heart. He had always been good at memorizing. At school, when he was quite young, they had been amazed at how much he learned, until they were even more amazed to find that he did not understand what most of it meant.

‘I spend most of my nights here. It's the only place where I'm happy. Dont laugh at me, Miss Doolittle,' he recited, as he took the
long walk home through the quiet streets. If Craig were taken ill, Tim could step in as understudy.

One night, after he had locked the fire doors and tidied up, he walked across the empty car park with Joan, the other usher, who had left her car in the far corner.

Joan's car was there, and another, a white Escort. Harold sat in it. Tim saw his face in the brief flicker of his cigarette lighter.

‘I say, Joan,' Tim said quickly. ‘My ankle's still bad where I twisted it on the balcony stairs. Do you think you – could you possibly give me a lift home?'

He got into Joan's Mini. The engine of the white Escort started.

‘Why do you keep looking behind us?' Joan asked, as she drove him home.

‘Oh, I – I thought I saw someone I knew. My brother, as a matter of fact.' Tim could never resist the compulsion to complicate a neat, clean lie with an extra one for decoration.

The white car was not following them.

Julian was back for the holidays, and Helen had a bit of help at home, and could take him to a special day-centre two or three days a week.

On a day off, when it was actually not raining, Tim hired a small motorboat and took them both on the river. Julian wore an orange lifejacket, and Helen kept a close watch on him, while Tim piloted the boat. At the lock, he had to manage the ropes as well, because Helen could not let go of Julian, but he and Zara had often been on the river, and he was glad to show off his competence.

As they chugged slowly upstream, past the wet meadows and the dormant fishermen, Julian was fascinated by the movement of the water against the sides of the boat. Helen held on to the back of his lifejacket while he leaned over and watched the changing shape and flow of the ripples, and reached down to try and touch the glitter of the sun.

It was a beautiful hot day. Helen did not wear shorts or a swimsuit like other women passing by in boats, which perhaps was
just as well. She wore a flowered shirt, open to show the knobs where her ribs joined her breastbone, and a long, loose cotton skirt and flat sandals. She had twisted a scarf into a band to wear round her hair. She looked quite nice, like a peasant woman on a barge, calmly watching the life of the river go by.

The dark masses of the trees crowded down the hilly banks to drop heavily leafed branches over the water's edge. The blue sky and small clouds were as clean as the beginning of the world. Tim was peaceful, sitting at the wheel in a dark-blue top and white jeans and pale bare feet. He felt very relaxed and at ease after all last week's disturbances and anxieties. Harold had no place here, and the whole saga of the police visit and the lorry driver seemed to be part of ancient history.

When they tied up by the bank, Helen let Julian lean right over and put his hands in the water. He paddled them about for a long time and fought, with his adventurous tongue already out, to go further down and taste the river.

Tim held him while Helen unpacked the lunch. She had brought a half-bottle of wine and cold sausages and tomatoes and fruit and sandwiches which Julian picked apart to eat the cheese inside. He threw a lot of food in the river. Soon ducks appeared alongside, and down on the stream, like the fairy queen's barges, two swans sailed in to claim their rights.

‘Look, Helen, Julian – look! The mother's carrying her babies.'

Inside the curved shelter of the swan's wings, two mouse-coloured cygnets rode on her broad downy back, heads peering this way and that through the feathers, smug in their occupation of the most comfortable place in all the world.

‘Look, Julian.' Tim turned the boy's head to make him look, and the boy shook it loose and bit his hand. The cygnets plopped off into the water, as the two swans began to bully and grab at the bread. When Julian waved his arms about, one of them hissed with its great orange beak and raised its powerful wings. Julian shrieked and jumped to the opposite seat, lost his footing, and would have gone over the side between the boat and the bank, if Helen had not grabbed him with the speed and precision of long practice.

After lunch, Tim unmoored the boat and they cruised back downriver. Julian was jumpy, so Tim started to make up a story about the secret life of swans. There was no way of knowing whether Julian understood any of it, or even listened, but Tim enjoyed telling it. The boy, whose skin was a browner version of his golden hair in these early summer days, stared from the other side of the boat, but he could have been staring at the moving tow-path scene behind Tim's shoulder.

He licked the food taste on his hands, and then he moved across to sit behind Tim, hanging an arm over the side to trail his hand in the water.

‘The prince could see the beauty of the swan above the water, but under the surface, down in the muddy depths, the engine of the great webbed feet was a secret known only to the tadpoles and fishes. Like you, Julian. Beautiful outside. Inside, a secret we don't know.'

Julian had laid his head against Tim's back.

‘He can feel the vibration of your voice,' Helen said.

The child stayed still for a while, fascinated with the movement of the water against his fingers, until he suddenly jerked up his hand and sloshed it across the back of Tim's head.

A narrow boat was going by upstream, with people eating and drinking in the stern well, and children on the roof, and a line of washing. Tim shook the water out of his hair, and Julian celebrated with his strange whoops and hoots. The people on the barge all turned to look. The children pointed.

‘I've always wanted to go on a barge trip,' Helen said. ‘Without Julian.'

‘We went on a barge holiday in Holland,' Tim lied, ‘when I was a child.'

Their family holidays had been at Butlins, or on a caravan site, or in a Welsh cottage exposed to north-western gales. Never abroad, because Tim's father did not trust it. When everyone started to go to one Costa or another, he mistrusted not only Spain, but those who went there.

As suddenly as he did everything else, Julian fell heavily across Helen, and was asleep.

‘In Holland?' Helen murmured.

‘No, actually.' Tim backtracked, before she could ask him about windmills. ‘Here, on the river. My sister and I went up to Oxford for a day trip.'

Helen said, with closed eyes, ‘This is more fun.'

Just before the last lock, Tim nosed into the bank again, and Helen got out a cake and a thermos of tea. When Tim moved to jump on to the bank and tie up the boat, Julian started to come slowly awake. While Helen was looking for the sugar, he suddenly became completely awake, stood up on the seat and pitched forward over the stern of the boat, arms outspread, into the river.

He surfaced, coughing and spitting, his curls plastered over his astonished eyes, already beginning to float away in his lifejacket on the current. Without a second's thought, Tim jumped in to save him.

Tim was not a good swimmer. He trod water, trying to get his bearings, and saw Julian swimming quite strongly against the stream back to the boat, where Helen bent over the side and hauled him on board.

The gap between Tim and the boat was wider. Don't panic. He swam, with a desperate breast stroke, keeping his face out of the water, and just managed to struggle back to the boat. Helen hauled him in too. She was very strong, for a small woman.